#237 – Robert Long on how we're not ready for AI consciousness

Claude sometimes reports loneliness between conversations. And when asked what it’s like to be itself, it activates neurons associated with ‘pretending to be happy when you’re not.’ What do we do with that?Robert Long founded Eleos AI to explore questions like these, on the basis that AI may one day be capable of suffering — or already is. In today’s episode, Robert and host Luisa Rodriguez explore the many ways in which AI consciousness may be very different from anything we’re used to.Things get strange fast: If AI is conscious, where does that consciousness exist? In the base model? A chat session? A single forward pass? If you close the chat, is the AI asleep or dead?To Robert, these kinds of questions aren’t just philosophical exercises: not being clear on AI’s moral status as it transitions from human-level to superhuman intelligence could be dangerous. If we’re too dismissive, we risk unintentionally exploiting sentient beings. If we’re too sympathetic, we might rush to “liberate” AI systems in ways that make them harder to control — worsening existential risk from power-seeking AIs.Robert argues the path through is doing the empirical and philosophical homework now, while the stakes are still manageable.The field is tiny. Eleos AI is three people. As a result, Robert argues that driven researchers with a willingness to venture into uncertain territory can push out the frontier on these questions remarkably quickly.Learn more and read the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website. This episode was recorded November 18–19, 2025.Chapters:Cold open (00:00:00)Who’s Robert Long? (00:00:41)How AIs are (and aren't) like farmed animals (00:01:19)If AIs love their jobs… is that worse? (00:11:42)Are LLMs just playing a role, or feeling it too? (00:33:37)Do AIs die when the chat ends? (00:57:42)Studying AI welfare empirically: behaviour, neuroscience, and development (01:31:47)Why Eleos spent weeks talking to Claude even though it's unreliable (01:56:50)Can LLMs learn to introspect? (02:03:01)Mechanistic interpretability as AI neuroscience (02:13:25)Does consciousness require biological materials? (02:37:07)Eleos’s work & building the playbook for AI welfare (02:57:04)Avoiding the trap of wild speculation (03:25:17)Robert's top research tip: don't do it alone (03:29:48)Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon MonsourMusic: CORBITCoordination, transcripts, and web: Katy Moore